Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!hi-csc!giebelhaus
From: giebelhaus@hi-csc.UUCP (Timothy R. Giebelhaus)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: New Apollo product: DN10000
Message-ID: <3ac202c8.b263@hi-csc.UUCP>
Date: 9 Mar 88 23:17:00 GMT
Organization: Honeywell CSDD, Golden Valley, MN
Lines: 41

I went to a talk by the product manager for the Apollo DN10000.  Here is
a summary of what I heard.

The machine is a multi-processor machine.  Apollo will license the
architecture.  Apollo has made most of the hardware themselves.

The speed of the machine should be 15-30 times the speed of the
vax 11/780 for one processor and 60-100 times faster for four
processors.  The machine has a high speed bus, high speed ECC memory,
and 15 meg / sec throughput on their disks.  The following bench
marks were quoted: Drystone: 27,000 and 5 Linpack Mflops (64 bit).
The machine is also supposed to do 30,000 to 40,000 vector operations
per second.

The cost is a base of $69,900 for a DSP node with one CPU, 8 meg memory, 
and a 348 disk.  A screen costs $10,00 and extra cpus costs $20,000 each.

The machine is a 64 bit machine.  Disk striping is supported. 

The CPU is a single cycle machine except for three operations:
floating point divide, integer divide, and square root.  That is, one
instruction can start each cycle, although it may take more than a 
cycle for an instruction to finish.  The CPU is a RISC cpu, though it seems
a large reduced instruction set to me.  The computer can do two floating point
vector operations in a cycle (such as multiply and then add).  The hardware
also includes clipping and transformation functions for graphics.

There has been lots of diagnostics build into the machine.  There is a bus,
a Motorola 68020, and 15% of the gate arrays dedicated to running diagnostics.
They use "scan path technology" which isolates any failures to the chip level.

There are two booklets full of information if you want more info.

Disclaimer: I don't promise all my notes were complete or correct.  I hope
this helps the people in comp.sys.apollo who wanted more info about the Dn10000,
though.
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